The Most Dangerous Thing I've Ever Heard from a TJC Minister - Reviewing the Case Against YM Yang: Part 4

For context behind this posting, please read the first post in this series. 

Holy Communion:

(A) Can a Christian from another church can partake the Holy Communion in our church. 

(2012.09.09, BaldwinPark.Q&A2.)(13:45-16:35)(mp3.5)

YM says, “This is a direction in which we could research further, that is whether a Christian from another church can partake of the Holy Communion. Many visitors come for our services during Holy Communion and when Holy Communion is served, others beside him are served and he is not. This breaks his heart – although you are usually so friendly to him, during Holy Communion, you suddenly treat him as an outsider. This is a very awkward situation. Can they really not partake in the Holy Communion? I say this is something we can research into further. In the Bible, you have verses that support and are against such a person to partake Holy Communion.

At this juncture Bro Chu interjected and stressed, Pr Yang is only suggesting a research possibility, not stating his support for it ”

Analysis: YM and Brother Chu emphasize that YM says we can discuss this further. They think there is no problem making such a statement. To me, it is a problem. A person from another church has not received proper biblical baptism. How can he partake of the Lord’s holy supper? If a person who has not been baptized in our church can partake in the Holy Communion, then our church’s baptism for the forgiveness of sins would not be absolutely necessary. Every time during Holy Communion service, the person administering it would announce that those who have not been baptized in our church should not partake in it. If one truly believes in the pure doctrines of our church, he would not raise this to be discussed as it would go against the baptism for the forgiveness of sins. If someone raises this up for discussion, it shows that there is deviation in his faith. This is just like the general  Christian world outside – as long as you believe in Jesus and receive baptism in a Christian church, your sins are forgiven and you are a child of the Lord. Although you have not been baptized in this church, you can receive Holy Communion in this church. However, our faith is not so. If you have not been baptized into our church you cannot partake our Holy Communion as your sins have not been washed away.

This is something that does not require discussion unless you have deviated in your faith. For example, if you are a preacher and you raise this question – can a preacher marry two wives? I did not say that I agree to this but I just raise this for discussion. How would you view me as a preacher then?

From what YM himself said, we see he has already deviated from the view that our three sacraments are absolute. Although he does not claim to deny it, he views that these sacraments are not a must.

It took me a while, but I finally tracked down the audio file referenced here. You can download it for yourself here.

The "evidence" here looks pretty damning, doesn't it? And yet if you listen to the entire exchange between Pr. Yang and the Baldwin Park members starting just 30 seconds before this transcript starts, you'll see that this exchange was not Pr. Yang "teaching" the members to question the Holy Communion.

Ironically, the only reason the topic came up in at all was because Pr. Yang was joking with the Baldwin Park members about how he had to be so careful in those days, because there were so many who were attending his classes with the sole purpose of trying to trap him with his own words.

Specifically, he recounted how he'd shared a message in Dallas where the topic of the Holy Communion came up. What's written in the transcript above seems fairly accurate. In Dallas a discussion had arisen concerning a common occurrence—how we invite friends to church on the day of Holy Communion and then it gets weird when we all take Holy Communion and our friends feel like they've become persona non grata. His first bit of advice was simply not to invite friends to church on the day of Holy Communion. But he also said that it's a question worth exploring as to who should and shouldn't be allowed to take the Holy Communion.

What's even more ironic is that at this point, he and a Brother Chu clearly repeated several times that in no way was he advocating nor even suggesting that non-members should be able to take the Holy Communion, just that it would be something interesting to look into.

Evidently this discussion had taken place on August 25 in Dallas but just two weeks later word had gotten around. In a meeting in Elizabeth on September, a minister (who had not been at that event) confronted him and asked, "Pr. Yang, how could you preach that people in other churches could take the Holy Communion?" In another meeting, a group of ministers asked him, "Pr. Yang, did you say that those who aren't baptized can take the Holy Communion?"

Pr. Yang then said that he wondered who was spreading these rumors. He joked in his typical self-deprecating way a sure way to find out. He'd look into the congregation during one of his classes. Anyone who had come to listen to what he had to say was surely sound asleep, while it was the few who were awake that he could pinpoint as the "spies".

It got a big chuckle out of the congregation and for good reason, it's a pretty funny line.

But the biggest irony is, this conversation whose sole purpose was to set up a joke, a conversation that lasted less than two minutes in a Q&A session of over 1 hour and 10 minutes and which repeatedly included disclaimers making clear that he was not advocating anything different about the Holy Communion, was the very thing that was pulled out and cited as incontrovertible proof of him "preaching heresy".

But since we're on the subject, let's address this question at face value.

First, I'll say that no, I don't personally think that the Holy Communion conducted by the True Jesus Church should be served to people who are not baptized in the church. And frankly, it's not something I imagine too many people will be insulted by. After all, if I sit in a Catholic mass, I know I'm not Catholic so I don't feel "left out" when everyone except me goes to partake of the Eucharist. Furthermore, closed communion is a very common practice in Christianity: the Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox Church, Baptists, and most other Christian denominations also limit communion to members of their own denomination. I hardly think this is in any way an important question nor even a very interesting one. 

Having said that, there's one statement in the analysis that really disturbed me. 

If one truly believes in the pure doctrines of our church, he would not raise this to be discussed as it would go against the baptism for the forgiveness of sins. If someone raises this up for discussion, it shows that there is deviation in his faith.

This statement isn't saying that if someone preaches something contrary to church doctrine it proves that this person is deviant in the faith. It's saying that if someone merely questions anything about it, they are a deviant.

With all due respect, this is perhaps one of the most dangerous things I've heard come out of the mouth of any member of our church.

It is not "dangerous" nor "deviance" to question things. The danger comes when you do not question things, and worse, when you instruct others not to question things. That is the behavior of a cult, not of a true church that is guided by the Holy Spirit.

There's a brother in Christ whom I respect very highly. He told me once that he'd heard a highly respected elder in our church preach something that impacted him greatly. He said this elder preached, "every day, I look for a church that has more perfect truth than the True Jesus Church".

On the surface this sounds like sacrilege, right? We're the true church, right? How can any church be more perfect than us?

But, this brother explained to me, he respected the words of this elder because they showed true humility. These words showed that even as a church elder for many years he knew that he was not perfect, and that as with every member of the church, as well as the church herself, he needed to constantly grow into perfection. They remind me of the words of Paul when he wrote to the Philippians that even he, the most prolific minister in the New Testament--and the man who literally wrote most of the New Testament itself--considered that he hasn't achieved perfection yet, but continued to press on toward the goal.

Who was that elder, by the way? It was Elder John Yang, the man who literally wrote the book on our church's basic beliefs.

This recent practice of our church leadership circling the wagons and silencing even any questioning of the church's teachings, even its "fundamental beliefs," smacks of something very troubling. And so I'll ask the same question I asked in my first post a few weeks ago. What is it about questioning that frightens people so much? Do they not have confidence that they can defend the church's doctrines, and especially its fundamental doctrines, amid such questions? And if not, do they doubt that the Holy Spirit that is within them and within their members is powerful enough to help them discern truth from falsehood?

I listened to the audio over and over and I don't see Pr. Yang even come close to preaching that those who are not members of the True Jesus Church should be allowed to take Holy Communion. He merely poses it as an interesting question.

There are those who say that ministers should not ask questions like this, especially not in public. And that's somewhere else that I have a fundamental disagreement.

First of all, this venue wasn't an evangelical service or a service for new believers. It was a question-and-answer session in the Baldwin Park church, in an audience that was presumably filled with long-time believers, believers who were well into the "solid food" phase of their faith.

Something I have heard Pr. Yang say in many, many of his sermons that impresses me greatly is that he's not there to teach. He's just there to share. He explains by citing this verse in Jeremiah:

I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

And this is what he had to say about it, copied and pasted from my notes: 

This particular prophesy profoundly changed me and the way I preach. The job of someone who preaches is really not to "teach". It's to help everyone recognize the word of God that is already in their hearts. Everyone should be able to share the inspiration they received from God. There are no more rote or standard answers. Every answer is pleasing to God.

While some may twist these words out of context, I hear them and I see the same humility in him that was present in his father. He's been a full-time minister for years, and yet he is willing to learn from others, because he knows that the Holy Spirit is powerful enough to work through anyone.

If our church was one that believed in teachings like the primacy of the Bishop of Rome and papal infallibility it'd be one thing. But we're a church who—I hope--still understands that its ministers are human. And as humans, they should be allowed to ask questions. They should be allowed to display their weaknesses. It's okay for them to have questions as they explore and look to attain more perfection in the truth just as the rest of us do.

This notion that everything that comes out of a minister's mouth has to be monolithic orthodoxy is dangerous, especially in a church that says we have the Holy Spirit to guide us. God works in mysterious ways. Perhaps he'll wish to reveal certain truths in a "Truth Research Committee" on a given day. But maybe just as likely on the following day he'll want to reveal new truths through the Holy Spirit in a 10 year old boy. To say otherwise is to deny the power of the Holy Spirit.

To intimate that merely asking questions about something is "heresy" is something that comes painfully close to a false teaching itself. The apostle John instructed the church to "test the spirits". The apostle Paul instructed the church in Thessalonica not to treat prophesies with contempt but to test them all, and he instructed the church in Corinth to examine and test themselves. How are we to test anything if we are forbidden to even ask questions about them?